Bioshock game guide

By: Matthew Rorie

The amount of hype that's surrounded BioShock in the months leading up to its release has been pretty remarkable. Billed as a "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2, Irrational Games' 1999 choose-your-own-adventure shooter, BioShock takes place in the world of Rapture, an underwater city built by Andrew Ryan, an industrialist who was intent on creating a utopia at thebottom of the sea where artists and businessmen could pursue their goals without interference from governments. Unfortunately, utopias are pretty boring places to stage FPS games, and as such, things went terribly wrong. The citizens were torn apart by crime, and took to rewriting their genetic makeup. This also had the wonderful side-effect of causing most of the civilians in the city to go crazy, sothat the failed utopia is now populated by barely-human freaks that want nothing more than to kill interlopers. Unfortunately for you, your unnamed character has crash-landed on Rapture's surface dock and has no choice but to descend into the city to survive. In order to fight back against the inhabitants, you'll need to adapt their tools for use against them. A large suite of weapons will beavailable, each of which can use different ammo and be fully upgraded, and you'll also be able to use a large number of plasmids, which are basically spells that can be cast on your opponents for various effects. You can set them on fire, force them to fight for you, freeze them before smashing their bodies, and perform any number of other actions. GameSpot's Game Guide to BioShock is going to haveplenty of tips and tricks for you. In addition to a full walkthrough, we're going to give you suggestions on how to bring down the game's enemies, instruct you on the game's fully modifiable weapons, and round things off with some basic hints. Enjoy!

Weapons and Upgrades
Weapons will be your primary source of dealing damage in the game if you're anything like us. Sure, you can get all fancy withplasmids if you like, but weapons are there to be used on your opponents. Luckily, the game encourages you to use weapons by liberally supplying you with ammo; if you're diligent in searching, you shouldn't have any problems finding huge amounts of ammo for your guns, assuming you don't insist on using a single weapon in every fight. The game also gives you plenty of cash, so if you do run low onammo, you'll usually be able to find plenty to make up for it. Each weapon (except the wrench) has three kinds of ammo available for it: a normal ammo, a rare ammo, and an inventable ammo. Normal ammo will be commonplace, and can be bought at most Circus of Values stores. Rare ammo will be tougher to find, but will still be around, and can usually be bought at Ammo Banditos stores. Inventableammo will be the toughest to find,
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although you will come across it in the game world. If you want a steady supply of it, though, you'll need to take your junk items to a U-Invent store and make some. Lastly,each weapon (again excepting the wrench) can be upgraded in two ways. You do this at Power to the People stations scattered around the game world. Each station can upgrade one of your weapons one time, after which it'll shut down. There should be 12 stations in all, although they're usually somewhat obscured and can be difficult to find since they don't appear on your map. Not all upgrades arereally worthwhile, though, so you don't need to find all of them unless you're looking to get all of the Xbox 360 achievements.

Wrench
The wrench will be the first weapon you pick up in the game, and one of the most useful throughout the game. At its most basic, this is a simple melee weapon: you hit your enemies with it a bunch of times, and they'll eventually die.

The wrench will be a...